In general Tara was made welcome and treated with respect, but she was sometimes berated by the councils. Once, when she had returned from a trip and I was quizzing her about the experience, she burst into tears as she recalled the loneliness, the pressures, and the humiliation. One band council member had chastised her: “Greenpeace and all you goddamned environmentalists. .” Many First Nations are understandably wary, having watched a succession of do-gooders like us too often abandon them with promises unfulfilled.
Many of the communities situated in the rain forest in the mid- to north coast of British Columbia are extremely isolated, some reachable only by boat or floatplane. Often they suffer from chronic high unemployment and thus are vulnerable. To secure a small medical center and the promise of a handful of jobs, a community may have to sign agreements that will allow a company to liquidate their forests in a matter of years. One of the most pernicious practices Tara observed in the late '90s was what government and company employees called “consultation.” Forced by the courts to consult First Nations, a company representative would fly into a community, call or bump into a few people and chat about their families, health, and local gossip, then call that a consultation.
Visiting the villages makes one re-examine concepts of wealth and poverty. I once visited a remote village of some two hundred people. When my plane landed, dozens met me at the dock. That night my hosts put on a feast in my honor. Tables sagged under platters piled with salmon, crab, halibut, herring roe, bannock, moose meat, eulachon, clam fritters, dried seaweed, and desserts. After dinner, the head of the band council opened the speeches by saying the band was poor and required money to buy things the people needed; that was why they had allowed logging in their territory.
When it was my turn to speak, I pointed out that in my affluent neighborhood of Vancouver, where there were probably three times as many people in one block as there were in that village, after twenty-five years I knew fewer than twenty of my neighbors by name. There was a park half a block away in which I didn't allow my children to play alone. Our home and car had been broken into several times. Even with thousands of dollars, I said, I could never have bought a feast like the one they had prepared for me. They were rich in what we had lost — community, land, and resources.
Yet Canadians have no right to tell First Nations they should live in some romanticized version of a museum-like state, frozen in time. These are twenty-first-century people who need boats and motors, computers and plane tickets. Can they protect their traditional values and their surroundings while finding ways to sustainably generate income for the things they need, in a manner acceptable to them? The decisions are theirs.
Although conservation was a serious issue to all the villages, jobs — community economic development (CED) — were the first priority. We accepted this challenge and set about turning ourselves into a CED organization, opening a DSF office in Prince Rupert and hiring Jim MacArthur, and then Sandy Storm, to run it.
AFTER EXTENSIVE RESEARCH for a CED model, we learned of a program called Participatory Action Research (PAR) that we thought might be of interest to the First Nations on the coast. For more than half a century, the program has been used successfully by peoples as diverse as Inuit in the Arctic and Sami in Russia.
PAR is based on a bottom-up philosophy whereby the knowledge, expertise, traditions, and skills within the community form the basis of its economic development. One of the first steps in the process is to hold community workshops to determine what people see as the community's strengths and what they want the community to be a decade or two later. Next, projects are identified and priorities developed. Soon, traditional mapping is used to determine how new jobs can be built from old. The PAR approach identifies a job here, another there, until collectively they add up to a significant number and help to keep the money circulating within the community. A par-trained worker is sent to live for up to three years in the community that is seeking a strategy for economic development. He or she gets to know the people, identifies their skills, abilities, and needs, then works with them to find opportunities and solutions until the adviser is no longer needed.
Michael Robinson, current chief executive officer of the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, has had a lot of experience with PAR and advised us in a series of workshops on the method. Tara began to discuss the PAR process with elders and leaders, taking other advisers into the villages with her. She developed an all-female team that besides herself included an economist and former head of the Vancouver Stock Exchange, Ros Kunin; a lawyer and now judge, Jane Woodward; a PAR expert, Joan Ryan, and a politically experienced First Nations member from Yukon, Lula Johns. People began to refer to them affectionately as the Spice Girls.
As Tara became a familiar visitor in the communities, we began to learn what priorities each village had. The first community to which we sent a PAR worker was Nemiah, a village on the east side of the coastal mountains. The Xeni Gwet'in (Nemiah) people's territory in the drier Chilcotin Plateau includes the headwaters of some of the richest sock-eye runs on the coast. Nemiah is about a four-hour drive on dirt roads from the town of Williams Lake.
Several people applied for the par position, and the band chose Roberta Martell, a garrulous, energetic, and tough young woman who had the drive to achieve all we and the community had hoped for and more. One of her first recommendations was to establish a community-owned laundromat in Nemiah. She started a community garden to provide fresh vegetables and organized the building of two straw-bale houses that were cheaper, more energy efficient, and of better quality than the kinds of homes built for the community under government cost allowances. She recognized the tradition of horse riding presented an economic opportunity to establish trips for tourists.
Roberta's greatest achievement was to recognize three young women who had the energy, vision, and connections to continue the process of economic development after she left. A film was made about the Nemiah project and broadcast internationally.
WHEN JIM FULTON ASSIGNED Tara to be a diplomat, he spoke of the need for coastal First Nations to unite in recognition of common values and goals if the fish and forests of B.C. were to be sustained. Both Tara and I knew such an initiative would have to come from the First Nations themselves, and while Tara worked on community economic development issues, we watched to see if it would be forthcoming. Tara knew our limited resources could not create jobs on the necessary scale: we hoped leverage could come when a powerfully united coast met with government.
In British Columbia, most First Nations are represented in what's called the B.C. First Nations Summit; delegates meet in Vancouver regularly to discuss issues of mutual interest. In the fall of 1999, timing our overture to coincide with a summit meeting, we invited leaders from the communities Tara had been visiting to meet us and each other to discuss some forestry information. Almost all accepted our invitation.
At the meeting, Art Sterritt from the Gitga'at community of Hartley Bay, and Gerald Amos of Kitamaat village, seconded by several others, commented on the novelty and significance of the gathering and suggested the DSF call a conference of all communities in the central and north coast and Haida Gwaii. We were delighted to do so. We invited the eleven communities, plus Nemiah, to a two-day meeting at the Musqueam Reserve in Vancouver in March 2000 and raised the money to pay all expenses. Members from all twelve communities attended.